Just a Dream
by Twisted Root
Summary: One shot.  Pretty much the 'one that got away' but with repercussions.


**This is a quick one shot that shouldn't make anyone's eyes bleed (I hope). It is based on the point of view of an OC and the Krueger in question is based on the one used for the remake of A Nightmare on Elm St, played by Jackie Earle Haley. I had a bit of story with this character pacing about my imagination but I thought it might be best to keep it short for now. **

Just a Dream

Another night, another blanket drenched in sweat but no blood. NO BLOOD. Thank God. Thank whatever it was that had kept her alive for the last 12 years. _Certainly don't thank Krueger_. She winced at the thought of _his_ name and the memories it brought. _Don't think of that name lest he hears you and comes to claim the one that got away. _

She prised the cheap grey cotton sheet off her chest and allowed the air to cool the sweat. Lying motionless on the thin mattress for a time, she took notice of the cracked ceiling and imagined how long the serpentine threads within the plaster would stay unchanged. They were there when she arrived and they would probably be there when she left, if she would ever leave.

It was _his _fault she knew how many cracks there were in the ceiling. _His_ fault that she had come to recognise the nightly shadows in her room that at one time had made her heart boom alarmingly after awakening from the usual nightmare. Over time, they came to be part of the familiar dark. No demons lurking in those shadows, only the ones in her memories and they were the demons that hurt.

Her thoughts turned to Frankie and to that terrible night. It had been bitterly cold, the kind that clawed the breath from your throat to leave it hanging in the air, but only if you were foolhardy enough to leave the warm confines of the house. _They should have left_. That night, Hell had raised the heat in their little home and had left Frankie dead…mauled.

He was just a boy. She was his older sister, she should have looked out for him, but she didn't believe in any of that urban legend crap about the man with knives for fingers until it was too late, until she began to take notice of those gut wrenching dreams. _It should have been me. _And it would have been her if they hadn't taken her far from Elm Street, far from her family, far away from the concerned residents and far enough from _him._

The psychiatrist said at the trial that she had no control and he was right. There was absolutely nothing she could have done, that anyone could have done. It didn't assuage the guilt that she felt about being lucky to be alive or those long sobering nights where she had wished that Krueger would come back to finish his job. During the trial, she was questioned about her childhood. Certain repressed memories dragged out from within the id to present to her a new fresh torment and yet another sharp memory tattoo that would forever stay with her.

_Don't think of that now or you'll never sleep again._

She was moved from the Juvenile Correctional Facility seven years ago and now she occupied a cell amongst other women who were also being treated for their 'delusions'. There were times when she would hear a scream down the hall and wondered if one of her neighbours had dreams similar to hers. She doubted it. Most of the inmates/patients were lost and she had been found cradling her dead brother in a room that had no signs of an intruder other than her. It didn't really matter to them that they would never find the murder weapon or the one who wielded it. Someone had to pay and it had to be somebody in their reality. Had she not have been naïve and scared out of her wits, she might have been free by now, but she had blamed the man in her dreams. Of course they didn't believe it, no more than they believed that you could handcuff a ghost.

_My God, the screaming! She would never forget that sound and the one that accompanied it: the quick metallic staccato of knives scraping together. _

Pulling back the sheet over her chest, she focused on the cracks in the ceiling and again wondered if they would ever be fixed. She also wondered if this was all just a dream and if it was, she prayed that someday, someone would wake her up to a life that wasn't a nightmare.


End file.
